Sonya Wilson's Blog

I’m pretty sure I missed the train. I think it even slowed down for me. I just didn’t recognize it until it was out of sight.

As it barrels away on a straight line further and further into infinity, its phantom runs around an endless circular track.

I think it’s time I started my own business. I don’t have half a million dollars to start an international dessert shop, and I’ve run into an impasse making chocolate with coconut oil that is not stable at room temperature. So, I think I’ll start a new greeting card line, one that is a little truer to the human experience. The rosy-side stuff you typically see maybe isn’t the best portrayal of what we’re really thinking, so if you’re going to rely on other people’s words to portray your thoughts to others in the first place, why not utilize honest greeting cards to mark those special occasions?

What’s currently available on typical greeting cards:

I’m So Glad I Found You

The day I met you
The first note of a beautiful song was played
And since that day
Every moment with you is a symphony
That turns any dreary day into a dream
[Poem truncated to keep writer from barfing]

More realistic:

I’m Kinda Glad I Found You, Sometimes

Being with you
is kind of like
finding an old guitar
Out of tune.
but I took that old guitar
Tuned it, polished it
Changed the strings
And it kind of sounded the same
Oh well
It’s mine now, anyway
Might as well keep it around
Like you
Time to play “Dust in the Wind”

Currently available:

Front of card: Happy Birthday to ONE AMAZING 4-YEAR-OLD!!!

Inside: You are such an amazing kid! You could run the world someday; just believe in yourself! And learn to form big hooplahs celebrating yourself, like this one today, and you will become a professional baseball player, or CEO of a multi-milion dollar company, or president!  Happy Birthday!!!

More realistic:

Happy Birthday to an Average 4-Year-Old!

I know you can’t read and couldn’t care less what this says, but to give a gift without a card would look lame, so I’m just following the tradition for the sake of my social life at this party. It’s actually a waste of money and paper, so maybe your generation can fix this tradition. I’m sure you’ll get something figured out since we’re going to be running out of a lot of natural resources by the time your generation is in charge of everything. Good luck with that.

PS- I hate to break this to you, but you’re no more special than any of the millions of other 4-year-olds on this planet. Sorry kid, but someone had to tell you.

PPS- While I’m at it, Santa is a BIG FAT LIE!  Spread the word.

Currently available:

I’m Falling for You…

I [censored for barfy content] and [censored] to [censored censored censored barf]

More realistic:

Happy One-Year-Since-We-Met-At-That-Party Anniversary!

I know we’re not technically dating yet, but it’s been fun hanging out all year. Hopefully one day, we might, you know, like, date. Like, you know, like, exclusively?  Maybe?  Cheers!

Currently available:

Merry Christmas to an Out-of-This-World Boss!

[censored for silly content]

More realistic:

It’s That Time of Year…

I thought it would be in my best interest to give you this holiday card with the chocolate candy taped to the front. Hope you like the chocolate, but if you don’t, feel free to give it back to me. I’m sure it will come in handy the next time you overload my plate and don’t let me work overtime. Ha ha!

Currently available:

To the Love of My Life

Being with you is like a dream;
‘Tis as sunshine on a cool fall afternoon.
As the crisp wind embraces us
All the orange and yellow leaves
Scatter around us like confetti
In celebration of our love.
May the colorful showers never end
As long as your hand is in mine.

More realistic:

To You

Being with you
Is like wearing an old shoe
Comfortable, but holey
With rips
and stains
On the blase beige canvas
When I actually wanted chartreuse
But let us focus on the comfortable part
Because focusing on anything else makes me uncomfortable
And nothing rhymes with uncomfortable
But since when did poetry have to rhyme
So thanks for all the comfortable times
Shoe

—-

Thinkin I might be onto something here.

Do I know my God?
I thought I did.
But by too much faith
I know Him less
And become Job’s wife.

Fall. Winds of sadness. Too much chatter from the outside. Retreat into the wind, the talking, telling breeze that promises darkness and cold to come.
The puzzle piece does not exist, no matter how many you try to fit in. Beautiful loneliness. But there’s something different this time. I can hear the wind, howling from where it came from nowhere. Or maybe that’s a plane. It doesn’t matter. It still howls.
The hummingbird likes the new purple agastache, or maybe it’s a salvia, or maybe a hybrid of accidental elements. I watch it eagerly suck the nectar, but I can’t follow the beating of its wings.
When I picked out the agastache/salvia, there was a bee in it. I waited patiently for it to finish flitting from flower to flower. But it didn’t. It buzzed about, taking no notice of me, and then stuck its head in the center of a flower and played dead for awhile. I eventually bought the bee.

Why does memory pick autumn?

I don’t celebrate Christmas anymore because a) I see no reason to and b) I have no relatives in town who celebrate it either.  Jesus wasn’t born in December and I can appreciate His incarnation and birth 365 1/4 days a year.  But the season does inspire wonder and contemplation; for example, how do people get to the point of wearing poofy reindeer antlers on their heads while working their nine-to-fives?  Why don’t we invent new holidays after awhile?  Can we get rid of the Santa Claus thing already?  Why would people lie to their kids about a mythical character and think it’s cute to see them fall for it?

But there is also something lovely about Xmas, and that is, I get two paid days off.  Certainly something to celebrate.  But eventually I will have to return to work, and I may get asked what I did for Christmas and I will have absolutely nothing to report.  So instead of saying “Nothing,” or, “I hung out by myself at home,” I’ll just say, “Let me forward you the link.” And since I’m sure they will really want to know, here it is, my amazing, excitement-packed day of the eve of Christmas:

I spent the morning busying myself with laundry, cleaning, and organizing my canyon hut.  It was a gorgeous day, so a little after 2:00 I donned capris, a t-shirt, a cap, and wrist guards, and took my skateboard a few short streets to Balboa Park where I just love to cruise.  There’s a mile or so stretch with just the right slope to weave down the wide walkway.  Toward the end it gets a little faster, and I noticed that if you crouch down, the lack of wind resistance really does make a difference in speed.  And that’s what we’re all about, see.  As long as we can do it without another sprained wrist.

It actually almost felt hot.  But the sun was beautiful and warming and I was weaving and grinning and remembering how cool it is to live here.

I passed a girl walking three beautiful, brushed Pomeranians in a perfect line.  The one on the right had a red bow, the one on the left ad a green bow, and the one in the middle had nothing.  Besides the natural question of why the middle pup got gypped, if I weren’t anti-Xmas pomp and anti-animal-pomp I’d say those pups brought me some holiday cheer.  But I am, so they didn’t.  They were cute, though.

After awhile I stopped to eat a Probar under a tree.  Balboa Park is full of multitudinous tree types; tall, short, stumpy, wide, gnarly.  I stared up into the tree for a few moments, contemplating nothing in particular.

Yes.  I took a picture of the tree.

On my way back, as I was about to cross the bridge on Fourth and Quince, I noticed that someone had just put up a community library at the roadside next to the bridge.  It was maybe two feet tall and three feet wide. Such community libraries were started a few years ago by some guy who owned a few books and wanted to encourage literacy in an urban area, or more likely, just thought it was a cool way to share his books.  The idea has taken root and you can see them popping up in random places.  I originally thought that the primary idea was to bring a resurgence of literary culture to the ghetto, and judging by some of the characters I see around my hood, maybe that’s about right.  Anyway, this one is a nice little painted stand with a sloped, tiled roof with a glass door and a few books inside that anyone can help themselves to.  Take a book, return a book is the general idea.  So I scanned the titles as cars gunned it behind me.  I moved to the bridge steps and read a few pages of “The Wednesday Sisters,” a fiction book about five women who develop friendships and decide to write a book together.  If it were nonfiction, I probably would have loved it.  But in my perusal I garnered just enough cheesiness to be repulsed; plus, I don’t have time to waste educating myself on one woman’s imagination.  Give me something that actually happened, great; I can learn more about people and human nature and the like.  And there’s just a certain intrigue about truth.

The other book that looked ok was “The Debt to Pleasure,” a discourse about international experiences of food.  It’s a rather pretentious thing written by someone I have a suspicion I wouldn’t like if I met him in person.  His writing smacks of smugness and conceit and just by reading a few pages you get the feeling that this guy thinks way too highly of himself and his conceptions of life around him.  That’s probably what I sound like too, but who cares?  I decided on this book because it was nonfiction, my current genre of choice, and because it was speckled with some unusual vocabulary words, which presents a welcome challenge to us simpletons.

I went home, book in hand, and sat on my porch for a bit with my lawn chair and wrote for a bit.  I love my canyon.  Shrubs with red berries wave before a backdrop of sweeping bamboo; low-growing shrubs litter the canyon floor, and three tall eucalyptus trees shoot up into the bright blue backdrop.  One of them is actually dead, but it’s still a pretty tree skeleton in between two lush, swaying enormities with tiny birds flitting in and amongst the branches.

Then I got to cooking.  I like to experiment; this one was grass-fed lamb ribs, baked with rosemary and oil in a bed of basil and sage-infused potatoes and carrots.  Now if that doesn’t sound pretentious, nothing does.  But it turned out delicious.  While I was at it, I roasted some butternut squash and toasted the seeds in soy sauce.

Yes. I took a picture of dinner.  No, I did not post it on Facebook.  I will not post such ridiculous things on Facebook.  That’s what the blog is for.

While I was waiting for it everything to cook, I had some appetizers and even poured myself a bit of champagne I found in my fridge that some kind soul had brought to some past gathering at my place.  I lifted my glass, a cool blue asymmetrical artsy thing I got from the Art Institute of Chicago.  “A toast,” I said, “…to Christmas Eve.”  Then I cracked up.

Truly, I have gone batty in my bliss of sweet solitude.

Xmas morning was even better.  I did absolutely nothing.

I’m not sappy.  But when my grandma, who in our estimation has been on her deathbed several times, opens her eyes, looks at me with that bright smile and tells me she loves me, my eyes spring a leak, and I am immediately in danger of turning into a weepy mess.  What’s that all about?

I’m not sad.  It’s the kind of cry that just hits you and you can’t help it, when your love for someone is all right there, in your face, and you can’t rationalize it away or hide it in a flurry of activity, but your raw, real, almost tangible affection built up over time is staring at you, demanding acknowledgement–and any tug or suggestion that that person is not always going to be there with you sends this bolt straight up your throat and through your head and you have nothing else to do but sit there and feel it as the tears just flow down and there’s no stopping them.

But it’s this kind of love that makes you feel alive.  And it shows that somewhere within you is the capacity to love deeply and even fiercely.  And if the human love is merely a shadow of the divine love, what kind of love could that be?  At the end of a long and fruitful life, Grandma is praying, over and over, short phrases, “And we shall be found…In love and humility…And we shall be found in You, O Lord.  We love You, Lord.  Let us be Thine.  Our love is Your love.  Our love is Your love.”

This 101-year-old lady whose physical body has gradually succumbed to the ravages of time, whose words are uttered weakly and far from eloquently, who needs help to eat, who the world has no use for anymore–how can I say this without sounding trite?–still enriches my life, but I can’t say exactly how.  All I know is that I want to be with her, to smooth down her hair, to smile at her and kiss her on the forehead, to see her little wave, hear her voice, to see the twinkle and the love in her eyes as she brightly smiles back.  I really cannot explain it.

But I have a hunch it might have something to do with this.

Tonight we had a conversation about love.  It was simple and it consisted of about ten words repeated over and over, but as she gave me those words, looking straight into my eyes, what was conveyed was much richer than any erudite discussion.  My verbal responses were even shorter, but it seemed to be one of the most meaningful conversations I’ve ever had with her–spirit & soul to spirit & soul–one that I will hopefully remember for a long time.

Yes, He loves us–and I love you too, Grandma.

Hush-a-bye
Don’t you cry
Go to sleep, my little baby.

When you wake
You shall have
All the pretty little horses.

Black and bay,
Dapple and gray,
All the pretty little horses.

I was never sure about the dapple one.  Black and grey were easy.  Bay was a little harder, but dapple required inquiry.  She explained that it was spotted, but even then the colors were vague and the spots amorphous.  Yet it was still beautiful, especially as carried by the melodious, clear tone.  Horses of different shades and colors were sunning themselves in that ethereal misty meadow, where particulars were trivial and the scene was all the more enticing for its vague borders.

I never expected to reach the horses.  But I would focus on them as I was drifting to sleep, pulling them closer.  As I concentrated on the scene, the glimmer of hope began to lodge itself in the recesses of the three-year-old consciousness.  I understood the difference between hope and fantasy but I tried to forget, as if blurring the distinction would bring me closer.

Even now I know: if I’m ever close enough to touch them, the dapple will be the first.

When you wake
You shall have
All the pretty little horses

So a misplaced apostrophe or comma can grate on my psychological homeostasis like nails on a chalkboard, and while we’re talking about it, so can annoyingly overused metaphors.  But when someone totally butchers English grammar because of a) ESL challenges or b) culture, I can actually find myself pleasantly amused.  Take the following example, a message I got from a prospective ebay buyer interested in a jacket I put up for sale:

Hi, is this be jacket fo men or women?
cuase i noticed you girl, right?
cause I no wanna be sporting wrong jacket, digging it?
much obliged!

Was this guy throwing in sociolinguistic variations into a business transaction just for kicks, or was this his modus operandi?  I assured him it was a guy’s jacket.  Then:

I be plannyng to wiming yu auction, but coulds yu pleze not be washhying di jaket cuase i not be wanting 2 got faded. Much obliged!

I assured him, in standard English (believe me, I was tempted to do otherwise), that I would follow his request.  He won the auction and I sent off his jacket along with a notification email.  He then made me smile with one more charming articulation:

Thank you for making me cools. I look pimping now!
I gave you all 5 stars!
Hope to do business again!!!!

I hate to admit it, but I kinda be diggin it, diggin it?

For some reason I’ve been getting Women’s Health magazine in the mail every month.  I vaguely remember getting offered a free magazine subscription and scanning thru a list of titles for something interesting.  I saw “Women’s Health” and thought, ok, I’m into learning about health and I’m a woman, so this one works.

Unfortunately, it’s almost exactly the same magazine every month.  There’s always a picture of a young skinny girl with long tousled hair wearing a small article of clothing on the front cover, and the cover story is always “FLAT SEXY ABS!”  You’d think that after a few months we would want to read something different.  OK, maybe they do switch things up just a little–in fact, I think last month’s was probably titled “Sexy Flat Abs!”  Or maybe it was even “Abs–Sexy and Flat!”

It’s rather insulting.  First, it conveys that the most important thing to us women who want to be healthy is having “Flat Sexy Abs!”  Secondly, in case the first is true, it assumes that the article is going to tell us something novel about how to achieve this.  Thirdly, just in case there is a dash of useful information there, the fact that they never change topics shows that they expect us to forget everything we read in 30 days, so they can print the exact same article again next month (with maybe a few changes in sentence order for us sharp ones out there).  I don’t see any use for this type of magazine except to encourage us to exercise our eye-rolling skills at checkout lines.

Since I have an interest in the publishing industry in general, I should probably stop criticizing and consider a better way to go about a women’s health magazine.  How about a normal, or even homely-looking person on the cover–or better yet, a photo of a delectable plump parsnip braised to perfection–and a short list inside as to how to be healthy:

1) avoid wasting time reading irritating magazines

2) eat real food

3) exercise

4) be happy

5) Now you’re done!  Quit reading and implement!

And this mag would only have to be printed once.  Imagine!  No re-wording necessary.  But somehow—I suspect by tapping into a socialized desire for an idealized body type that most women are not genetically prone to—they keep managing to sell the same mag with the same “Flat Sexy Abs!” claim every month.

Ok, now that I’ve vented a bit, I dug into my small collection of Women’s Health front covers I’ve actually hung onto just so that I could make fun of them at an opportune time.  Friends, the time is now.  Heh heh.

And I’m not entirely correct.  They do vary their cover story titles a bit more.  Examples: “Lean and Sexy Now”/ “Beach Body Now!”/ “Sexy Abs and Butt!”/ “Tone Every Inch!”/ “Blast Belly Fat!” ad nauseum.  Then for the filler stories, there are some tantalizing titles such as “Jiggle-Free Arms,”  ”Is Your Relationship Making You Fat?” “Fight Gravity (and Win),” and “Build Lean Muscle and Blast Evil Cellulite.”

Honestly, I’m glad someone has finally decided to address how to blast evil cellulite.  But given the scope of its subjects, I think a better title for this magazine would be “Women’s Fat Wars,” which are apparently launched once women read these articles and realize that fat and gravity are intelligent enemies that need to be ruthlessly attacked and destroyed, immediately.  (Come on, women—the natural aging process is a sham!  If we don’t launch our defense now with an aimless sense of purpose–fueled by photos of women who are genetic anomalies–and slap down $4 for this mag, now, we’re going to disintegrate into a heap of sagging flesh, tomorrow!)

Don’t get me wrong.  If some people need this kind of motivation to go get some exercise, how can I say the magazine is useless?  But wait!  What’s this?  An article amidst all the “Intensive Spot Targeting Serum” ads, at the very end of the mag, entitled “Get Smarter Every Day.”  Ooh, something about brains.  Let’s see what it has to offer.

“We all want to be brighter bulbs in the chandelier.  But rather than cursing your mom for those martinis she downed while you were cooking in the womb, check out these five ways to improve your brainpower.  They’re simple, they’re fun, and one of them even involves spending QT with your TV.”

Oh wow, I can improve my brainpower while watching TV?   I’m so glad some new-age research has uncovered this one!  (Like the dolt they are making me out to be, I read on.)

“Pick up a Kafka novel or even a book of modern poetry and you’ll be helping your brain work better, according to a recent study in Psychological Science.”

Oooh, really?  A modern study PROVES this??

“When you’re exposed to something that doesn’t automatically make sense,” [um, like life?] “…your mind tries to find some other kind of meaning–a response that kicks your gray matter into high gear and enhances the part that’s in charge of learning.”

Ooooh–there’s a part of my brain that’s in charge of learning??

“…People who read lots of fiction tend to be more empathetic and socially intelligent than those who don’t.  The bottom line: Read something with substance.”

OK!!  Now that’s finally some good advice…so I guess that will end my perusal of this magazine.

P.S., to the publishers–There’s nothing wrong with my abs!!

Summer 2010

Disclaimer:  This is a boring post.  It’s my first non-travel related, non-photographically documented, a real “obviously-I’m-done-with-roaming-around-the-world-and-writing-about-my-amazing-adventures” post.  It could barely keep my own attention.  Yes, I’m back to the daily grind (whatever that is), or pretending to be, so be prepared to fall asleep at the screen.

I don’t normally pin much meaning to dreams.  Sometimes they’re worth a laugh, and occasionally I can glean from them a bit of insight, or what I perceive to be insight.  But on the very rare occasion that I have a recurring dream, I start to pay attention.

Of any recurring dream I can remember, this has to be the recurring-est.  I think I’ve counted up to five or six times over the past year or so and last week it happened again.

It goes something like this: I’m in college again, taking a few classes, getting close to graduation.  There’s about a month left in the semester when I remember I’m enrolled in a really important math class, but–whoops–I haven’t been attending for about two months and had actually forgotten about it.  I need that class to graduate, but how can I catch up on two months’ worth in time to pass the final?  I have to review trig and algebra to even do the work, and somehow I’ve forgotten almost all my math!  How am I going to get through this class and graduate? AAAAAA!

Then I wake up, remember that I already graduated from college and I didn’t even need calculus to graduate, and bask in a wave of relief.

I mentioned this recently to a friend of mine, and he laughed and said he’d had the same type of dream, that he actually hadn’t graduated from college.  But I was pretty sure that my recurring dream didn’t have to do primarily with graduating from college; it had to do with MATH.

Math and I have a long history of a love/hate relationship.  We had rocky beginnings, me with memories of sitting in at recess to finish math problems I couldn’t possibly finish because I was concentrating all my energy on hating math.  I could do the word problems because they involved a story, but the plain numbers–ick!  After what seems like eons of forced learning, I somehow finally start to like it as taught by the no-nonsense, raspy-voiced Corky Harrison my freshman year in college.  (Hardcore lady, that Corky.  Looked about eighty years old but also looked like she could run a marathon, if she weren’t coughing and puffing on cigarettes almost every time I saw her outside of class.  Great teacher.)  Eventually, I start to dig the challenge, discover how exciting math actually is, bond on a deeper level with my TI-82, ace some exams, and become a stats and algebra tutor in college.  Finally, math and I are buddies [enthusiastic cheer], and now I can help others who are in the same wretched state of hating math as I was long ago.  Yes, my friends, math is fun, and what an inspiration I am to the mathematically challenged, indeed.

So why do I keep having this dream?  Was it because I dropped calculus, which I had been taking for personal growth and challenge?  Am I haunted by my past fears?  (Dun-dun-duuunnn…)

Anyway, I’ve started studying for the GRE.  I’d gotten an ok score on a practice exam when I was in college, but I want to practice and practice so I can kill it and get into Emerson.  So today, I finally break open my GRE math study section for some review, and…lo and behold, I can’t do any of the problems.  I’ve forgotten basic algebra.  Numbers swim before my eyes.  I try every problem, and I’m like, an equation with 3 variables?  How do I do that??  What’s with all these triangles?  What does “trig” even stand for?  After a few non-solved problems, I remember my dream an have a little KAHFWOOSH! (sound of dream colliding with reality) moment.  Maybe my subconscious had been nagging me about something; I really do have to re-learn trig and algebra.  It’s been ages since I stopped playing with square roots.  And I DO have to re-learn it to graduate, since you have to actually get IN to the school before you graduate.  AAAAAA!

After attacking it for a couple hours, though, I feel a little better. I’m getting re-aquainted with equations…ah, equations!  Those were good times.  Hello there, Pythagorean Ratio.  Remember me?  We need to re-kindle our relationship.  It’s just going to take a little time.  Sigh.

I told you…boring!!  In fact, this post was so boring I’m having trouble posting it.  Maybe if I add a picture it will help.

That’s not helping.  How about some fire, me, and a bunch of Italian guys?

That’s better.  And a pic of my nephew–

Ah, there we are.  What a happy, huggable little dude.  Sigh.  Now I can go to bed knowing I posted something good.